Self-reliance often begins as survival and slowly becomes a prison.

In this episode of Living the Third Way, Shae and Adrian explore how self-reliance forms in families where it wasn’t safe to struggle, need help, or fail. What begins as a protective adaptation can quietly turn into a belief that you must carry life alone and that suffering means you’re doing something wrong.

They examine how modern manifestation culture and New Thought spirituality reinforce this pattern by promising control over reality, while subtly placing the full weight of healing, happiness, and meaning back onto the individual. When pain can’t be “thought away,” it easily becomes personal failure.

Through the lens of Catholic anthropology and personalism, Shae and Adrian offer a different path: healing that happens in relationship, identity that is received rather than constructed, and a vision of the human person as a mind–body–soul unity. This episode invites listeners to lay down the exhausting work of doing life alone and to discover why dependence, rightly understood, is not weakness, but mercy.

Interested in deeper support?

We offer daily mentorship for individuals navigating family wounds, emotional overwhelm, and the slow work of healing in relationship. You can find out more at our website: https://adrianandshae.com

We’re also currently building a waitlist for the next cohort of our group program, Unmeshed, which guides participants through disentangling from family enmeshment and reclaiming their God-given identity through psychological and spiritual integration. Email us to express interest or be notified about the next cohort: hello@adrianandshae.com

Referenced in this episode

• The Mindful Catholic by Dr. Greg Bottaro

The start of a new year often brings resolutions, pressure, and quiet disappointment when we don’t live up to our plans. But what if there’s a different way to begin?

In this episode, we propose an alternative to self-improvement: self-stewardship. Rather than fixing or optimizing yourself, what if this year became an experiment — a chance to see whether caring for the self you’ve been given actually leads to more freedom, presence, and life?

We explore what it looks like to tend to your interior life with curiosity instead of pressure. We reflect on how small shifts in attention, care, and responsibility can quietly reshape not only your own experience, but also the way you show up in relationships — including family life.

This conversation is an invitation to begin the year without urgency, guilt, or grand promises — and instead, to stay long enough with yourself to discover what’s truly life-giving.

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If this conversation resonates, we invite you to continue the exploration with us. Our upcoming free webinar offers space to look more closely at how self-stewardship and relational healing intersect, especially within family dynamics.

You can find out more here: https://unmeshed.online

And for those longing for deeper, ongoing accompaniment, our daily mentorship is a place to heal and practice this way of relating to yourself and others with support, clarity, and presence.

You can find out more here: https://adrianandshae.com

At Christmas, we celebrate a God who does not heal from a distance, but enters fully into our humanity. In this episode, we explore what the Incarnation reveals about the way real healing unfolds — not through bypassing emotion, body, or relationship, but through inhabiting them with truth and love.

Drawing from Catholic anthropology and the Third Way framework, we reflect on why God chose flesh and blood, what that means for our nervous systems, our family relationships, and our longing for peace, and how healing happens slowly, relationally, and from the inside out. We explore how integration, rather than control or avoidance, is at the heart of both the spiritual life and relational restoration.

If you find yourself caught between staying connected and staying whole, this conversation offers a hopeful path forward.

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As mentioned, we invite you to join us for our upcoming webinar, where we’ll explore how to disentangle from family patterns without cutting people off or losing yourself. You can register here: https://unmeshed.online

And for those longing for deeper, ongoing accompaniment, our daily mentorship offers a space to walk this path with support, clarity, and presence — the kind of healing the Incarnation itself points us toward. You can find out more here: https://adrianandshae.com